"There is no doubt that Clausius with this paper created classical thermodynamics. Compared with his work here, all preceding except Carnot's is of small moment. Clausius exhibits here the quality of a great discoverer: to retain from his predecessors major and minor—in this case, from LaPlace, Poisson, Carnot, Mayer, Holtzmann, Helmholtz, and Kelvin—what is sound while frankly discarding the rest, to unite previously disparate theories, and by one simple if drastic change to construct a complete theory that is new yet firmly based upon previous partial success. ...By no means disregarding the results of experiment, Clausius was the first theorist of thermodynamics who was not enslaved to them... those which to him seemed dubious were to be rejected... Clausius had another handle... his kinetic theory of gases... Both Rankine's model and Clausius' model... led to a theory... "dynamical"... [F]aith... gave... Rankine and Clausius... confidence... while Kelvin, not yet an atomist, wavered. ...[I]n the molecular theory Clausius was not only the wiser man but also the better physicist."
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Rudolf Clausius
Rudolf Julius Emanuel Clausius (2 January 1822 –24 August 1888) was a German physicist and mathematician. He is considered one of the founders of the science of thermodynamics. By his restatement of Sadi Carnot's principle known as the Carnot cycle, he provided a more fundamental foundation for the theory of heat. His most important paper, On the Moving Force of Heat (1850) was first to declare the second law of thermodynamics. He introduced the concept of entropy in 1865, and the virial theorem
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